THIS IS IT !! So much BETTER than Triples! | Pimax Crystal First Impression

hey guys alien Dan here if I wasn't a streamer and content creator I would 100 switch to the pi mix crystal in this video I'll let you know why [Music] so the usual disclaimer first pymax did send me this headset for review I can keep it for 90 days test it make the video but then I'll have to send it back and that will be definitely hard might have to accidentally get lost in shipping or something because it's really really good I also have an affiliate link for the headset if you want to support the channel at no cost for you it also gives you a 20 discount on the crystal once you pay your pre-order so this is more like a first impression video I've had it for about two weeks now and me being relatively new to VR I had to learn a lot of stuff figure stuff out I'm still not 100 there I still need to learn a lot of things but I wanted to make a first quick impression video talk about the features talk about what I like and what I dislike it's more like no Fancy b-roll video just like me talking about it and showing you all the features there's a feature called Dynamic for the edit rendering I hope I pronounced that correctly that is absolutely a game changer especially for ACC but I will show you all these features in the game very quickly the build quality I think is decent I think for the price it could maybe be a little bit better it is a lot of plastic it is heavy and the buttons feel okay but overall it feels solid enough and I don't see any issues using this to be honest one thing that is a bit weird but apparently it is uh because of a licensing issue with the chip they use in here because this headset also works in Standalone mode obviously I haven't tried it but even if you use it in your rig you need to actually install this battery here it lasts about five to six hours according to Pi Max I haven't measured it I've had no issue with battery life it comes with two so you can always switch around and have one fully charged but keep that in mind that it is a battery powered headset the installation process very very easy you just install the pymax play software this is how it looks like the diagnose messages are insanely not helpful because I had some issues first with the headset because I had my triples connected and the VR headset I thought for outputs that works fine but the resolution then is actually too high so I had to disable the site monitors in order for the VR headset to work but the only error I got was like update your GPU driver that was not insanely helpful but yeah installation is very very easy you basically just install the pymax play software we are using a beta software here because that one has eye tracking and the auto ipd adjustment enabled but it's pretty much install the software and you're good to go I've had no problems with this apart from that issue with the too high resolution with triples and we are connected but apart from that it has been perfectly fine the pymax crystal is probably the first VR headset where I did not put it on my eyes and be like okay it is a little bit pixelated I wish I had my triple still here because there everything just looks sharper this is you don't you don't really see any pixels like if you really really really want to see it and focus insanely hard you can see the pixels still but it's it's comparable to these 1440p triples I would say it's insanely nice and the absence of that pixel United grid you typically see it just makes it feel even more real in my opinion it also uses a qled panel I think with local dimming and stuff the colors look very nice contrast is great the blacks are really dark I don't think it's OLED but it kind of looks close to that I would say the sharpness and resolution according to Pi Max's 35 PPD pixels per degree and like I said I don't really see any pixels while using that fov I don't have a lot of experience I know the HP Reverb Gen 2 I would say this has a slightly higher fov but you definitely still get this helmet feeling when you wear it so your view is not limited by your eyes but you see some black borders at the end of your visual field I absolutely don't think that is a problem at all if you like the fob of something like the HP Reverb this is slightly bigger I would say so you will be fine it feels basically like wearing a racing helmet while driving so it might actually improve your immersion I've had no complaints about the fov when testing it in a flight simulator I wished the fov was maybe a bit bigger but yeah okay a few words about the Benchmark system here we are using a 40 90 GPU and the 13900k I probably should put the x3d 7950x in this system but I haven't done that yet but I would assume it would perform even better with that CPU because we are in many cases CPU bottlenecks and Sim racing I'm going to show you eye racing and ACC the headset itself is set to 120 hertz I've had zero problems with that apparently according to the website there's also a 144 and 165 Hertz mode in testing but I don't have access to that backlight I like to run at around 90. it's insanely bright so with the highest setting it's almost a pain in your eyes if you for example if you drive through a tunnel and then you get out of the tunnel again you look into the sun it's almost blinding you so I turned this down a little bit then I have eye tracking enabled and the auto ipd adjustment pretty convenient it's showing 58 here but when I set it up it's typically 59.2 59.5 and then for the render quality what we are running today will be the custom setting at one so we are rendering the full resolution but no over sampling because that resolution is already high enough then smart smoothing I have disabled didn't really notice a big difference to be honest and the rest is pretty much default but I would say we'll start with eye racing and I'll show you the performance and talk a little bit about my impressions in that game also the settings we are using openxr this thing is fully compatible with opmx r there's also a new version of the Opex R toolkit I think 0.4 that enabled the eye tracking I think for the public use currently the eye tracking is not enabled in the software yet I do have access to it pymax was so kind to give me access to that and it works fine I'll show you how to use it what it's doing it's very very nice to see because you can basically make the the stuff you're not looking at black and then you see what's happening there but I would say I will help into the Sim we're going to do mmp3 at most Port because that's the combination I've been driving this week so just convenient okay so when I actually put this on wait you don't see the overlay no it basically tells me how I need to put the headset on so for example now it's relatively high so it tells me I should put it lower and then until now it says Okay I hold it there for a second then it adjusts the eye distance automatically and then we are good to go just need to see that I'll select the correct mirror here because we have the mirror from the openxr toolkit where you can also see the menu and then this is basically the eye racing mirror kind of looks horrible but it is what it is and then this is basically just what the left eye is seeing so as you can see here there's also the the FPS and stuff and I want to show you the menu if I go here this is the op Max R toolkit menu so you can see what I'm doing there wait first I'll show you the options here just so that you see what I'm using for graphic settings we do have pit objects and grandstands set to low detail apart from that I'm pretty much using whatever I'm using on my triple screens I do have the shadow maps and Cloud Shadows turned off because that costs a lot of performance with not a lot of visual gain I typically run that on off on my triples now as well then we do render for cockpit mirrors no virtual mirror he tastes because it looks pretty when it's warm and yeah but now we'll switch to this so that you can see the mirror yeah as you can see FPS we are at 80 90 now because we are CPU bottleneck like I said with the 7950x3d it's probably better um but these are the settings that I'm using right now so I do use the NIS upscaler set to 75 percent it's like an a very good upscaler that renders the game at a lower resolution and then upscales it with the insanely high resolution of this headset I think you can get away with 75 it still looks very very sharp there's sometimes a few artifacts like if you look at the fence there for example but when you're driving you don't notice that and then I'm also using for the edit rendering and I'll show you what that is doing I have the eye tracking enabled and if I turn off the middle ring here you can see what it's doing as you can tell there's a little dot in the middle where you can see that in the recording you can perfect so in the middle we now have an area 25 size that is rendered at the full resolution so this is wherever I'm looking at for example now I'm looking at the raised logic or the steering wheel now guy you get the idea so this is rendered at the full resolution if I turn this down you see the rendered resolution will look potato and this is basically how our eyes are working so the eyes will only see sharp in the middle of your field of view and then the closer it goes to the edge basically the less sharp you can see so we can for example make this ring here a little bit smaller let's say 80 percent where we want to render at a resolution of let's say at 1 16 what a hard word to say of the resolution I do not see that it looks bad but I do see the flickering from the lower resolution so what I like to use is a quarter resolution here that way for me with these settings like 25 in a ring at Full Resolution quarter resolution 80 outer ring and then outside of that is well the stuff on the very outside 1 16 just so that there's some colors I don't notice that we are rendering in the lower resolution you can probably see it very clearly in the recording because you obviously look for it but for example like if I look look around then the sharp spot will just move and well that's the idea of the whole Dynamic phobiated rendering but let's just drive a little bit you can see that we are pretty much CPU bottlenecked because I racing I need to reset here and then go back because when I'm driving with triples I'm basically sitting here uh so when I reset I don't want to change the camera setting around all the time so I'll just reset um when I'm in the front left so we are getting 90 FPS serum eye racing we can turn down some settings to get the 4120 but this looks fine to me honestly if I wasn't streaming I think for streaming VR is not good because you see the the captured image just doesn't look very nice and it's a little bit I don't know I don't really like looking at VR streams so I'm also not going to stream in VR but if I was not doing this whole thing 100 I would switch to that the visual quality that I'm seeing here is absolutely amazing I do get higher FPS when I'm not recording because OBS is stealing a little bit of power here but I was not hitting the full 120 I was at around 110. 15 maybe but that is good enough in my opinion you can also go to the 90 FPS mode then you have a higher Headroom available and I think the difference between 90 and 120 FPS is not insanely big it is noticeable but I would probably just run it in 100 in 90 frames mode on a on a daily basis but yeah the it's it's so much like VR if you haven't tried VR you need to do it it's hard to describe it's it feels like you're sitting in the car and with this visual quality I don't know like my issue with VR in the past has always been that it feels the graphics just didn't look as nice but here with this resolution I mean if I look at this at the steering wheel here everything is so Crystal Clear Crystal Clear yeah get it right we're smart there we go uh yeah I would definitely definitely switch to that I'm not faster with it mainly because I'm used to monitors um when I tested this and wasn't like driving and playing around and stuff I was like two to three tenths of my monitor time because the breaking points just feel different but if I was using this regularly I'm pretty sure that the lap time would just be the same or maybe even better than using monitors and especially when you're close to other cars it's just very very nice to be able to to look to your site and you just have a better spatial awareness of what's going on around you one downside this headset is freaking huge and you can see I'm using a seat with these ears so I I can't really look that much to the left and right because I'm just like hitting the ears so if you wanna get something like the bimax I would recommend get a seat without these ears I mean it makes no sense anyways for Sim racing don't ask me why I have this um but yeah this is just something to consider but yeah on eye racing the dfr does not make a big difference if I go to off here and on you can see the frame rate is pretty much the same because we are just CPU bottlenecked there's nothing we can really do about that even if I turn this off then we we are getting 120 FPS now but now we have insanely uh tunnel vision so we do not want that but something we could do for example I guess is first of all highlight the eye racing window because otherwise I cannot operate it but for example turning off the mirrors would probably give us better performance yeah I can see now we are hitting 120 FPS let me switch to the other window again so I haven't played a lot with the in-game settings but it's definitely possible to have this run on 120 FPS I think the resolution could probably be turned down even more because it's all everything is so sharp and so good looking it's I guess if I rendered this at like 80 of what I have currently it would still be more than sufficient and see now if we look at the CPU and GPU headphone we have about 50 of CPU Headroom 20 of GPU Headroom it is eye racing is not benefiting that much from the for the added rendering from my experience unless you really make the outer ring black so everything doesn't render as much but I wouldn't recommend doing that I would probably just turn off some other settings like the mirrors or something that you don't really need and then get the better performance from that we are currently running 40 cars on track here most sport is not a very well optimized track but also not the most taxing track but 90 FPS mod I see absolutely no problem with one front with 120 FPS mod you will definitely have to tweak your settings a little bit play around with the upscaler and the native rendered resolution stuff like that and I'm sure like once I use this for a longer time I will find ways to optimize the performance more like I said I'm just losing VR for like two weeks now and I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to this and especially eye racing is just weird when it comes to Performance like you would sometimes think doing this and that will improve performance and rs and be like here how about more and then yeah let's just try an error I will keep using this with eye racing and I will make another video after two months or so of using this where I talk about my impressions and give you a verdict then but I am very very very pleasantly surprised how this feels but I would say We'll hop onto ACC because ACC is known to be a horrible optimized for VR and there the dfr actually helps a lot but let's put up ACC alright the settings I'm using is pretty much the VR High preset the only thing that I did was uh contact Shadows set to enabled view distance High and then I turn down the VR pixel density because then it's probably over sampling and then we are upscaling and I just set this to 100 that looked good and as you can see here while we are sitting in the pits with dfr on again it looks horrible on the screen recording but if you're wearing the headset you do not see a difference between the four viated rendering enabled and disabled with the eye tracking and in terms of performance I will show you the correct window here so get into the pi Max op Max R thing mirror so this is with faviated rendering enabled and if we turn it off I mean we still get the 120 FPS here sitting in the pits but you see the GPU Headroom is 15 and with it on it's actually 21 so it gives a performance boost without costing anything pretty much and I mean when you're just sitting here alone on track the game can handle it's no problem 120 FPS but if you're actually doing a race then oh yeah well having with an accurate one if you're actually doing a race then your performance a Headroom is actually shrinking quite a bit you will drop below 120 FPS even with the dfr enabled in very rare scenarios let me actually like I'll put up an AI Race So AI with 30 drivers probably at night because that's the most taxing on acc I think and I will show you the FPS numbers but something that I need to say it looks so freaking amazing ACC in VR is supposed to look hot wait I'll turn off the dfr so it actually looks a little bit a little bit amazing for you as well maybe it's probably very hard to see on that VR mirror but everything is so incredibly sharp I don't think I've ever seen ACC so sharp even on monitors you know ACC always has that problem that it's slightly blurry in the distance for whatever reason with this it's just not the case it looks it looks like a different game honestly [Music] but I'll hop wait oh the whole whatever needs to be in Focus here is slightly annoying you don't have to do that when when you're driving obviously it's just uh for me so for me well actually it's for you so you can see the menu and the frame rate and the Headroom stuff all right ACC dfr is enabled so wherever I look it is sharp or should I need to stop the car and where's the lights here cool that blue light looks pretty but as you can see in these settings that I'm using VR high with some stuff turned up a little and the VR resolution turned down from 120 to 100. using openxr with the NIS upscaler set to 75 and the render quality in the primex crystals set to 100 percent the performance is not a big problem we do see a more of a CPU bottleneck here again if we used the 7950x3d this would be much better because ACC loves the 3D cache so now we have a CPU bottleneck the GPU is actually fine so we probably wouldn't even have to use the dfr but especially if you're on a weaker GPU and you're typically GPU bottlenecked this will make your life so much easier you can probably run the same settings on only 40 80 40 17. I unfortunately what am I doing here don't don't have one of those here but yeah you say 120 hertz a few tiny drops at the start but now we are pretty much good to go and this it looks so pretty it looks much nicer than my racing actually and I've always heard that ACC is horrible in VR and everything but with this and that high resolution and the dfr that allows the 120 FPS it's just amazing yeah it's it's just absolutely incredible the tracking issues that some reviewers noticed by the way with jittery movements uh I guess I got lucky I don't have any problems with this the only problem I have right now is that I haven't driven ACC in forever and can't drive but so far this headset has been very very easy to use not problems firmware update the firmware update takes takes a little while like 20 minutes and you think okay and now everything broke but you just have to be patient but so far no problems very very happy with this like I said if I was not streaming on content creator because let's be honest this looks a little bit ridiculous on the cameras uh if I wasn't doing that I 100 would have to learn how to draw VR and I would use that it's just it's not even close to the experience of triples it's you have this in the car feeling and the high resolution and everything you can probably tell I'm insanely insanely uh impressed by the success it's just oh my God let's just blame that I don't have a setup loaded okay yeah I I but you can you can tell I don't really have words for it and again I have to say that several times because I know people will be like oh my God this looks so horrible the pixels that you see now because I'm recording this at the the outer edge of the picture I don't see that because we have eye tracking I always see a very sharp render of everything so yeah it's just it's free performance at no cost pretty much because it's it's not noticeable not at all it's also very amazing on Microsoft flight simulator I'm not going to show you that now because there are enough flight simulator VR guys that's that we'll talk about this but in Microsoft flight simulator I get a boost of like 60 to 80 90 FPS using epic settings with this PC with using the dfr and I think it's I hate that word but it's a game changer for VR to have the dfr working so yeah I would say that's pretty much it for the video there will be a full review and let's say two months or so I want to give this enough time I want to get more knowledgeable with VR what's important how to Benchmark everything and oh it's so cool to be able to look around the car and I just want to educate myself a bit more so I can give you my best suggestions for this I will also put the x3d processor in the system because now we are actually in the CPU bottleneck scenario and the x3d at least for eye racing and ACC is much better than the Intel so we will try that to see if that helps and yeah 120 FPS it's pretty awesome we can well I can't go to the settings but it's the VR High preset the VR epic preset is still like I get like 70 80 FPS with bfr maybe 100 but the high preset in VR to me looks basically indistinguishable but actually that's pretty cool to see the car approaching going around here yeah as a compressy I'm pretty Amazed by VR but that's it for the video again if you are interested in this headset use called Dan Suzuki on checkout that gives you 20 well 20 that would be nice 20 off it's an expensive headset it's like 1.5 K or so and it also supports the channel for free for you basically so if you want to help out with that there's a link in the description it is an affiliate link keep in mind but yeah if you have any questions or anything that I should cover in future videos with us let me know if you have advice for me what I can do and try also please let me know that's it for this one and I hope to see you all in the next one if you like the content maybe like the video and subscribe to the channel bye

Channel: Dan Suzuki

Views: 65,676

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Id: flD1o9N0uqM

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023